A quick search in any search engine will turn up Wix as one of the best website builders in 2022. And you have probably heard about WordPress and how it is one of the most popular platforms for creating a website.
When you are just starting out, making the right choice for creating a website can be a daunting task. There are lot of options available and it isn't always clear which of them might be ideal for you.
In this post, I will provide you a detailed comparison between Wix and WordPress in terms of their ease of use, customizability and cost to help you make an informed decision.
Wix vs WordPress
Lets begin with a brief introduction to both Wix and WordPress.
As you might already know, Wix is a free website builder that you can use to create a website. There are a few simple steps that you can follow to create websites using Wix. You begin by picking a template and then doing appropriate customizations.
You can create different kinds of websites with Wix such as a simple blog or an eCommerce store, you can even create an event booking website among other things.
WordPress, on the other hand, is a well-known CMS that also allows you to create and publish all kinds of websites. As a beginner, it is important to know that WordPress comes in two flavors. The hosted version available on WordPress.com does a lot of hand-holding for you and is similar to other SaaS website builders. In this tutorial, we will be comparing Wix with the self-hosted WordPress.org version which is a free, open-source project.
Just like Wix, you can use WordPress to create a simple blog, an eCommerce website or an event scheduling and management portal.
Installation and Ease of Use
Wix like many other website builder services tries to make the process of creating websites as simple as possible for its clients. This means that the whole process will be very beginner friendly and you can use its drag and drop builder to get started.
There are a lot of things that you have to take care of before you can even begin the website creation process. Wix will take care of many aspects related to hosting a website for you all at one place. This can save you a lot of headache during the initial setup.
When using WordPress, you will have to figure out many of these things yourself. You will need to be at least a little bit familiar with basic concepts of hosting and web development in general.
This means that for absolute beginners, using Wix to create a website will definitely result in an easier and faster installation process. WordPress on the other hand will require you to put relatively more effort into the process.
Available Designs and Layouts
Wix offers over 500 unique and customizable website template for you to pick from when designing your own website. You can either use some pre-populated templates or begin with blank templates. The templates are divided into a variety of categories such as Business, Health and Wellness, Travel and Tourism, Fashion and Style, Photography, Design and Music among others.
WordPress also offers a huge variety of free themes (currently over 5000) for you to install and customize. However, not all of them look as polished as those offered by Wix with the exception of some popular themes. You get a lot more options with WordPress but the quality of free themes is a bit better with Wix.
Luckily, WordPress is an open community and everyone is free to contribute to the project. As a result, many designers and companies have created quality paid themes for WordPress. The leading marketplace for premium WordPress themes is ThemeForest.
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When it comes to availability for templates for initial design of a website, I will say that it is a tie between Wix and WordPress. However, you will need to use WordPress if you want complete flexibility for customizing a design.
SEO and Analytics
Usually when people create a website, their aim is to reach as many audience as possible. There are a lot of contributing factors that ultimately decide how much traffic your website would get but SEO is important here.
Both Wix and WordPress offer a large variety of tools at your disposal to optimize your website for higher search engine rankings. Both of them will allow you to add a custom URL structure, meta tags, structured data, robots.txt file, XML sitemaps and much more.
You will also be able to use content delivery networks and caching solutions as well as image optimizations for faster and efficient delivery of content to your visitors.
Another thing that is very important for growth of a business is analytics. You need to collect and analyze the data on behavior of different people who visit your website. This will help you figure out how to organize the content of different pages of your website for maximum revenue or any other targets that you want to achieve.
Both Wix and WordPress will allow you to perform a detailed analysis of user data. You can get thorough information based on a variety of metrics like sales, booking, traffic, subscriptions etc.
One important distinction here is that all the SEO and analytics tools are already baked into Wix but you will have to install multiple separate plugins to do all this in WordPress.
Overall, I would consider SEO and analytics reporting a tie with slight edge for Wix because it natively supports all the functionality.
Customization and Extensibility
Businesses usually want their websites to be unique and easy to use or navigate in order to improve their sales etc. All businesses have their own unique needs and target audience that they want to serve. This means that while using pre-built templates is a good way to get started on a website, you will need some customization options in order to cater to a specific set of customers.
Wix gives you a decent amount of customization options. For a quick start, you can use the built-in templates and customize them further. However, Wix also allows you to start from scratch and create your website with drag and drop builder. More advanced users who can tinker with code can integrate advanced functionality in the website with Velo.
WordPress is a completely open platform so you can customize any aspect of the website that you want. You can choose from thousands of themes to install and customize. It is up to you to make small changes to the original theme or create a child theme which you can then modify further. You can also start from scratch and build a theme from ground up. This gives you absolute control over the look and functionality of every single element on your website. The markup, the CSS and the JavaScript will be exactly what you want it to be.
This ability of WordPress to accommodate all your customization needs gives it an edge over Wix.
WordPress also has a thriving ecosystem where you get access to thousands of plugins created by different developers to extend the functionality of your website. Lets say the functionality that you want isn't provided by any available plugin. In that case, you can go ahead and implement it yourself.
WordPress is definitely better than Wix if you are looking for customization and extensibility.
Cost
Lets talk money now. Which one of these two platforms will cost you more for running a website?
It is not possible to correctly give you a proper estimate about costs without knowing exactly what functionality you want in your website. However, we can get a rough idea of the starting costs. Wix has a pricing table on their website where they list the monthly costs of a plan when billed annually. I would like to mention that the cost and plan features will vary depending on the regions from where you access the website.
WordPress by itself doesn't cost you anything to use. You can install a copy of WordPress on your local development server and start using it today. However, you will have to pay for hosting and domain registration. Hosting can cost you anywhere between $60 a year to several hundred dollars depending on the traffic etc. Costs of domains usually start from $10 and keep increasing. However, these are the costs that you will have to pay no matter which service you use.
This basically means that WordPress is a more cost effective solution if you are not looking to do something overly complex and plan on using free themes and plugins.
Should you Use Wix or WordPress?
Different website building platforms cater to different target audiences. There is no single platform that will be ideal for everyone.
When it comes to choosing between Wix and WordPress, you have to ask yourself a couple of questions before deciding which one you should use. The table below summarizes everything that we have discussed so far in the post to help you make a decision.
| Criteria | Winner |
|---|---|
| Installation and Ease of Use | Wix |
| Available Designs and Layouts |
Tie |
| SEO and Analytics |
Tie |
| Customization and Extensibility |
WordPress |
| Cost |
WordPress |
People who want to get up and running with a website as quickly as possible and don't want to bother themselves with the technicalities should definitely opt for Wix. Besides, its ease of use, Wix will also provide better support in case you do get stuck somewhere.
Anyone who wants complete control over different aspects of their website should opt for WordPress. WordPress will also generally be cheaper to use. However, keep in mind that upfront costs are not the only thing that matter when creating a website.
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